Tiger shipped with the heavily outdated Apache 1.3.x and PHP 4.x. While both of these versions where working and helped people to get started most of us liked working on the newer releases of that software. Besides the Apache Software Foundation has moved into security update, and critical bug fix only mode for the 1.3.x series of the web server and as we all know the PHP project as announced end of life for PHP 4. Its a good time to move on as I showed you how to do on my blog.

To my surprise however I found when plating around with my Leopard install it has as default the latest version of Apache and PHP installed per default. You still need to activate the PHP module yourself by uncommenting it in the httpd.conf configuration file which is in a new location by the way.

The new location of the configuration and the modules is in ‘/etc/apache2/’ instead of the default ‘/etc/httpd/’ you would expect. I’m sticking to the last one by the way for my installation.

The modules are installed in ‘/usr/libexec/apache2/’ and there are some remarkable modules name in there. What would you think of a module called mod_bonjour, I wonder what that one does. Another one is mod_auth_svn which would indicate a default installation and wonder me it’s installed. Mod_perl and mod_fast-cgi are there as well. I will try to mimic the availabilty of these modules in my install scripts.

PHP is another question, with php-info() you can retrieve the configure command-line, it looks like:

Depends on what you plans are. The default installation is pretty solid with these new versions. If this suits your needs than you can use the built in versions, but you will be dependend on the wimps of Apple. The apache configuration as documented here all will work but the config files are in a different location.

The current documentation has been updated to reflect the changes that are required for Leopard. I’m still thinking of adding a part to the documentation where you are instructed to update or change the default install of Apache and PHP.